The Best of Both Worlds: How to Collaborate on Go-To-Market while Increasing Team Velocity

In the modern digital world, teams are faced with many challenges. Teams must consider a number of factors and reconcile short with long-term goals to ensure an organization meets its objectives and is on the right path to growth and success.

From the product management perspective, product teams, in particular, have a number of challenges to address including:

• Revenue pressure
• Fighting churn 
• Collaborating with other teams, namely customer support and success 
• Low product engagement

On the engineering side, technology is evolving so quickly that engineering and development teams have to constantly keep up with new technologies, deal with outdated architecture and the technical debt that comes with that as well as inevitable decisions that need to be made from time to time.

There’s also the issue of how to deal with bugs that often come up in production despite the number of smoke tests, automation, and QA engineers working hard to mitigate the risk.

This could result in serious delays to your release process that can have a major negative impact on your business, including many unhappy customers.

Thus, the challenges for engineering and development include the following:

• Slow code development and deployments
• Operational risk
• Bug management and downtime 

There are other problems that also often arise namely capacity and prioritization for both product managers working with feature teams and development teams.

How can these teams minimize risks when they release into production and how do they decide in which products or features to continue to invest in the first place?

In a webinar featuring our VP of Product Marketing & Education, Aaron Stillman goes through these challenges and discusses how teams can successfully tackle them.

The webinar, aptly titled ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, illustrates what it’s like to be a product manager collaborating cross-functionally across commercial go-to-market teams and feature teams and developers. 

With these challenges in mind, he provides ways in which product managers can collaborate effectively with the aforementioned teams to increase velocity through the use of feature flags while reducing risk and impact on users by avoiding big bang deployments.

Consequently, he goes on to discuss how you can leverage feature management and experimentation to get the ‘best of both worlds’, both on the go-to-market and commercial side and on the feature team side. 

For example, feature flags allow teams to get close to the customer by experimenting in production and exponentially gain confidence on what is truly minimally viable while avoiding the 'gold-plating syndrome'.

This allows go-to-market teams to increase speed to market while delivering consistent optimizations to existing features as well as innovative new features and products that differentiate in the market.

Feature teams also gain confidence that they're releasing products that customers actually need through feedback received during experimentation, thereby increasing velocity and quality output.

Watch below as he goes through some of the most common use cases for feature flags and how they can help you release fearlessly with less risk to all teams involved. 

You’ll also find out how some clients leveraged Flagship to carry out experiments in production by conducting product acceptance and quality assurance testing live in production on real customers and obtaining their feedback before exposing the new functionality to all users.

Key takeaways

Below are just some of the main takeaways from this webinar:

• Feature toggling allows you to increase velocity to continuously deliver innovative and valuable releases faster than ever before by decoupling code releases from market launches.

• No more big bang releases equals less risk and stress for everyone involved in the release process. Progressive deployment is the only way forward to ensuring a delightful experience.

• Through experimentation, feature flags can help not only minimize negative impact on your revenue, business and users but also on your internal teams by constantly validating product ideas, as well as enabling teams to determine if further investment is needed while preparing for the next innovation.

Watch the full recording below